Call Center Optimization: Springboard Your Success

Most of our blog posts emphasize the role a phone call plays in a business.

BIA/Kelsey says ‘phone calls are the new click’ and estimates that 73 billion calls will be made to businesses this year. (Source)

Call Center Optimization

For many organizations that focus on inbound calls, there are two types of strategies:

You can have individual locations that take and receive your calls, or

You can centralize your calls into some form of calls center

This centralization of talent creates economies of scale and advantages in the call center environment. This environment provides you with a unique advantage of aggregating data and talent at one location and focusing on their specific skill areas around just answering inbound calls.

Is your call center optimized to handle your most valuable lead? Or is it the major reason why you lose your customers?

According to Scorebuddy,

“40% of consumers abandon a company for one of their competitors due to subpar customer service.” (Source)

In this rapidly digitizing world, phone calls are the only human touch to most businesses and call centers the only place providing this human touch. Hence, ignoring call center optimization, or not paying adequate attention to how do your call center operators handle inbound calls can be a grave mistake.

Strategies that most influence and improve call center optimization include:

Call script improvements

Phone call handling

Sales skills

Appointment setting skills

Reservations setting skills

These are just a few to name. You can easily train your call center operators to excel in the above-mentioned skills. But what’s more important is the ability for organizations to receive inbound calls from marketing, handle them with skill and convert them into positive business outcomes. Organisations must aim for these conversions if they wish to make the most of their most valuable lead source. Call centers can focus on conversion rates per campaign or conversion rates by location.

Compare Yourself to Yourself

Organizations often focus on driving value for specific locations or stores that they support as a part of their business. While trying to improve, most organizations will follow industry trends, and ignore what insights they can get in-house. Comparing yourself to your competitors does draw value but the biggest improvements come when you get the inside data, and compare yourself to yourself. I would like to share a colleague’s experience regarding this fact.

One of the organizations my colleague was working with recently was undoubtedly 10% to 20% more effective than any of their industry counterparts. The organization owed their success to

Being able to filter their results in their call center

Looking at which locations were being most effective

Analyzing the results against each other

They found that one of their locations was drastically more effective than their other locations. They were able to use this location as a model and optimize their other locations.

What’s interesting is that if they had centralized their skills they may never have seen this hand to hand combat that they had in their locations. They wouldn’t have seen this huge advantage.

The organization could springboard their growth because they were more effective in receiving calls than their competitors, and they had the insights they needed to improve their overall business performance. They were able to grow drastically faster than their competitors in the area, and even today this organization is still growing infinitely faster than their competitors. They have continued to add stores in locations where their competitors can’t reach them anymore.

Their overall growth really circled back to a couple of key areas where they needed to focus:

Making sure what they had centralized was generic and not specific to locations

Refining and handling their promotional capabilities

Standardizing and improving their call handling procedures and processes

With these three points in mind, they were able to sharpen their sales skills as it were in their ability to close and sell appointments on in their calls. They’re almost twice as effective as the industry in converting inbound calls which is turning into a lot of deals and a lot of revenue for them.

Conclusion

In short, the one step that sped up their success is having an optimized inbound call insights operation, where they are leveraging Conversation Analytics® to outcompete their competitors.

This is just one example of the many of our customers that have seen drastic improvements and results by gaining additional insights and information into the way that their talent handles calls by implementing Conversation Analytics® along with their tracking software.

To know about Conversation Analytics® and how Convirza can springboard your success, contact us now and leave a comment. Feel free to share this simple step to success with your beloved friends.